Resting easy with the Booker

The lack of ‘Indians’ in this year’s prize race should provide cause for introspection

In late July, one news item largely escaped attention, making a fleeting appearance in the inside pages of our newspapers. The Booker longlist was out, and not a single Indian author had featured in it. The national media just as easily ignored it, moving on to other things. For someone not particularly clued in to the literary scene, it would seem that the Booker Prize is not taking place this year at all.

For long, our engagement with the Booker Prize has been defined by this sort of inconsistency. Our frenzied reactions to a Booker win, making no qualms about appropriating the success of an immigrant elite as unmistakably Indian, only make the task of a critical engagement more difficult. In the event of an Indian winning the prize, as Adiga last year did, the otherwise indifferent attitude to the prize transforms into another opportunity to beat up our chests with proud nationalist fervour.

This is particularly silly, because every artistic achievement is, first and foremost, an individual one. Writing is even more so – it is an act of solitary cultural production, the fruit of the labour of hours spent alone. At times, this alliance with nationalism can also backfire spectacularly, when writers are unwillingly bound to the metanarrative of a rising nation. The most obvious example is Arundhati Roy, whose oppositional politics surprised those who were quick to anoint her the darling of a resurgent India.

Far more alarming, though, is the reluctance of the literary intelligentsia to contest the politics of the Booker Prize. The prize now has been awarded to diverse writers from many parts of the world (within that relic called the Commonwealth), imbuing the Booker with the appearance of radical qualities. Yet despite 40 years of the prize, the category of the so-called ‘universal’ writer is still occupied by the white Christian male. The rest can all be slotted in a ghetto of their own – women writers, Asian writers and so on.

Especially in the case of Asia and Africa, the writers function as imperial ethnologists, representing their ‘native’ lands in forms that must both entertain and elucidate. It is not surprising, then, that while the prize-winning citation of predominantly white writers is framed in generally vague liberal humanist terms, the Indian and African writer usually finds his work slotted in particular terms, representing a country or continent.

Another aspect that makes the evaluation of the Booker problematic is the debate within Britain as to what purpose the prize must serve. A substantial section of the literary establishment believes that the Booker is essentially a ‘British’ prize, reflecting the country’s values and ideas of literature. Not surprisingly then, in the year after the prize has gone to an ‘outsider’, the Booker finds itself responding to a backlash that exhorts it to return to its origins as an upholder of British literature.

This is as true of 2009, as it has been of previous years. Let us consider the books that won the prize in 1982, 1998 and 2007 – years after Rushdie, Roy and Desai won respectively. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982), Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) are books that share a convention of form, theme and narrative. All are defined by a sedate, conservative way of storytelling, centred on events distinctly European. This is offset against the tumultuous narrative energy and radical formalism of at least two books that preceded them – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

A look at the 2009 shortlist is revealing, yet entirely predictable, with its abundance of quintessentially British novels. The Booker favourite, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, is a tale about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s trusted adviser, as he tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Booker website calls it ‘that rare thing: a truly great English novel’. Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze is a historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, while Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is a ghost story set in post-war Warwickshire. Add to this, AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a ‘vivid, rich and moving saga taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme’.

It is during years such as this that the Booker’s relevance as a global literary prize comes severely under question. Therefore, this is a time good as any to examine the Booker Prize in its historical context and redefine the terms of our engagement. One of the most heartening aspects of The White Tiger win last year was the vibrant cultural dialogue and spirited debate that followed. It is a dialogue that, in a mature literary milieu, we must now seek to begin on our own. The Booker may then become an event to which we pay attention, but it does not define our sense of literary worth.

Taking coins out of a jar

In conversation with Sharanya Manivannan

AQUAMARINE: Sharanya Manivannan's Witchcraft traverses questions of identity and gender.

The first time I met Sharanya Manivannan was at a reading at the Park Hotel in Chennai, early in January. A friend of mine, Mridula Koshy, a writer based in Delhi was reading at the event and had invited me. Later, some of us had gone for a drink at the Bamboo Bar in Savera Hotel, on Radhakrishnan Salai. Sharanya and I barely spoke that evening, although she did give me a card with her e-mail address.

Therefore, I could only vaguely summon up her appearance after she agreed to meet me for an interview. We meet at The French Loaf, a charming cafe on Harrington Road, sitting comfortably on wooden benches under the shade of two huge trees. “I was born in Madras,” she says, as I try to sound interesting, despite itching for the facts.

Born in 1985, she spent the early years of her life in Sri Lanka (her mother is Sri Lankan Tamil) before moving to Malaysia. “It was the worst decision my family ever made,” she says. In 2007, Sharanya caused a controversy by terming the practice of racism in Malaysia as ‘apartheid’. “I thought I was stating the obvious,” she says. “Any country that practices segregation, based on race and class, can be accused of apartheid. And to name something is to give it power.” She recounts horrendous incidents of being at the receiving end of a backlash by the Malaysian establishment. Finally, she gave up, left college and moved to Chennai 15 months ago.

This condition of exile and dislocation permeates her work at some level or another in her debut collection of poetry, Witchcraft.  Described as a “startling, sensual book of poems heralding the debut of a new voice”, Witchcraft traverses the questions of identity and gender. It is a mature work, and belies the voice of someone so young. Sharanya says that being brought up by her grandmother has made her ‘wiser’ and while listening to her, there is clarity of thought unusual for a 23-year-old. It is almost as if she has lived many parallel lives, and her perception is the aggregate result of the experiences she has accumulated.

I mention her poem Blood Lotus, and how I feel that the conflict between nature and culture underpins many of her poems. Suddenly, she gives a shriek of delight (“You’re very perceptive. You just made me understand my work better”) and then goes on to talk about the social taboos linked with menstruation. “The ancient idea was that a force rests in objects and the body. But this has been appropriated by conservative thinkers to see menstruating women as a polluting force.”

She takes out a copy of Witchcraft and talks about her poem Ananku, which deals with the trauma of the ceremony that accompanies female puberty. She says, “The poem is about the relationship with my parents.” Towards the end of Ananku, there is a line where without any warning or explanation, the script changes from English to Tamil. The question of language is a delicate one, for anyone from the subcontinent writing in English, and I found this innovation particularly striking.

She says, “The language in my head is a hybrid of Sri Lankan Tamil and English, though English was my first language.” She points out the use of non-italicised Romanised Tamil in other sections of the book and then says, “The idea is also to obscure things from the reader. I’m saying to them – Listen, I’ve already told you too much. So, this is a medium of inaccessibility to me for a largely non-Tamil audience.”

I tell her that one of my favourite poems is the powerful and nostalgic You Bring Out the Sri Lankan In Me. She says, almost immediately, “I would like to say here that, in that poem, I made some politically irresponsible statements purely in the interest of lyricism. I do not and have never supported or believed in the separatist terrorism that the country suffers under.”

The statement has a rehearsed quality to it, but when I talk about the various protests across the state, she pounces on it. “Oh, these armchair activists! They don’t understand our culture and let me say that we are a different culture. We are a clannish community (laughs) and like all clannish communities, we look down on other cultures.”

She mentions with dismay about the self-immolation of Muthukumar and saves her contempt for the irresponsibility of the political class. “They go for their own motives, and get the people excited by making them feel part of something bigger. Now, we have schools and colleges closing down. They don’t understand conflict and history. I don’t understand it either, but they just pontificate to serve their own interests.”

She talks with passion and feeling about the Sri Lankan issue, but the conversation moves away when I ask about the novel she is working on, Constellation of Scars. “It’s got all the usual clichés – love, loss, longing,” she says. “It is the tale of a 20-something photographer, who is obsessed with the preservation of transitory moments.” She expects the novel to be finished in a few months and says, “The protagonist has been in my head since I was fifteen. It’s been inconsistent over a lot of years. Only now, I have found the right voice. But I want to finish it first and then talk about it.”

We hang around for a little while more, talking informally. She tells me she is looking for an opportunity to move out of Chennai, where she currently lives with her family in Nungambakkam. She is considering writing the rest of her novel in Pondicherry, and quitting her job as a copywriter. “I need to quit my job,” she says, while asking me not to take it down.

“I have a really cushy job. And someone once asked me – do you want to be a full woman or a writer? Because a full woman is supposed to have money and financial independence, all the feminist nonsense about the woman who pays her way. But a writer is someone who, at times, takes coins out of a jar.”  On this final, beautiful note, we end our conversation. Sharanya walks away, stops an auto, mutters something in Tamil, and then she’s gone.

Cricket and 9/11 in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is an extended reflective essay, an exploration of the tumultuous New York of 9/11 and the Iraq war.

It is the story of Hans van den Broek, a banker who spends two strange, forlorn years in the bohemian Chelsea Hotel after his English wife Rachel leaves him along with their son Jake, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. Early into the novel, we are introduced to the emotional vulnerability and pervasive fear that gripped the city’s inhabitants. As Rachel leaves for London, Hans wonders,

She had fears of her own, in particular the feeling in her bones that Times Square, where the offices of her firm were situated, would be the site of the next attack. The Times Square subway station was a special ordeal for her. [...] Throngs endlessly climbed and descended the walkways like Escher’s tramping figures. Bare high-wattage bulbs hung from the low-lying girders, and temporary partitions and wooden platforms and posted handwritten directions signalled that around us a hidden and incalculable process of construction and ruination was being undertaken. The unfathomable and catastrophic atmosphere was only heightened by the ever-present spectacle of a little Hispanic man dancing with a life-size dummy.

Thrust into despair by the abandonment by his wife, Hans seeks comfort in the thriving and invisible world of New York cricket, which we are told, has a unique history. (‘First modern team sport in America; played in New York since the 1770’s. First international cricket matches were between the USA and Canada and watched by thousands of fans.’)

Hans grew up in Holland and got hooked to cricket as a young kid as one day while walking in the woods he saw ‘through the trees the white flashes of boys mysteriously organised in a green space.’ In New York, the game is played mostly by immigrants from Asia and the West Indies, and in this sub-culture, Hans finds relief from the inertia of his quotidian existence. Hans reflects, “What we talked about, when we did talk, was cricket. There was nothing else to discuss. The rest of our lives – jobs, children, wives, worries – peeled away, leaving only this fateful sporting fruit.”

O’Neill is at his best in Netherland when he writes about cricket, threading prose with such elegant beauty and perceptive vision, which makes you wish the novel would have made cricket the sole object of its enquiry. At one moment, Hans says, “For what was an innings if not a singular opportunity to face down, by dint of effort and skill and mastery, the variable world?” In another burst of poetic rumination, he reflects,

But I still think, and I fear will always think, of myself as the young man who got a hundred runs in Amstelveen with a flurry of cuts, who took that diving catch at second slip in Rotterdam, who lucked into a hat trick at the Haagse Cricket Club. These and other moments of cricket are scorched in my mind like sexual memories, forever available to me and capable, during those long nights alone in the hotel when I sought refuge from the sorriest feelings, of keeping me awake as I relived them in bed and powerlessly mourned the mysterious promise they held.

It is through cricket that he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian, who talks “incessantly, indefatigably, virtuosically.” Chuck has ambitions of building a grand cricket stadium in New York, which would lead the revival of the game in the United States and would make America a proper civilization. He explains, “All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.”

Hans finds in Chuck an escape from the dull and tedious rhythm of his own life. They develop an unusual friendship as Hans chauffeurs Chuck on his business dealings as preparation for his driving test. He becomes keenly aware of Chuck’s world – his ambition, his recklessness, his guiltless affairs while having a devoted wife.

It may seem baffling why Hans feels a sense of solidarity with Chuck – why, for example, could he not feel such affinity with someone else, someone closely bound in terms of interest and lifestyle? It becomes to easier to fathom this once you realise the breadth of O’Neill’s transnational vision – New York being a place where geography both expands and contracts. Hans is a product of this vision, growing up in Holland, married to an Englishwoman and living in New York. Chuck, like Hans, does not feel any sense of oneness with any national entity, but an obligation only to oneself.

One of the strengths of Netherland is how effortlessly it navigates from the recesses of memory to the fierce urgency of the present. The account of the virulent anti-Americanism following the attack on Iraq in the novel comes as Hans is marooned in thought, sitting in his balcony, when a call from Rachel informs him that she’s not moving back to New York. She says “she would not expose Jake to an upbringing in an ‘ideologically diseased’ country, a ‘mentally sick, unreal country’.”

Chuck, in early 2006, is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal, handcuffed to the back. His death is an apt reminder of the limitations of the boundless myth of the American Dream, which led Chuck to harbour grand delusions about the result of his New York Cricket Club. As one character, a business associate of Chuck, remarks after his death, “There is a limit to what Americans understand. That limit is cricket.”

The brutal death of a man ‘who had more life inside him than 10 people’ is a subtle metaphorical retort to the delusions America harbours and encourages within its inhabitants about the ability to control one’s destiny, the totality of individual control over agency and desire. 2006 is not an entirely co-incidental timeline, as the Iraq war becomes a quagmire and forces a nation to question its assumptions of self-worth.

Yet, 9/11 and Iraq are terms that are used sparingly, never to overtly exert on the reader the nature of the political climate in which Hans exists. The big, external conflicts are examined through the inner tumult of the protagonist. This makes Netherland a deeper and more meaningful exploration of that time and space than a novel like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. The fundamental flaw of DeLillo’s novel, and others like John Updike’s Terrorist, is that they strictly view 9/11 through the prisms of exclusion, and frame their plots and narrative around the sequence of subsequent political events. Netherland is a more honest document of that fateful September, and its repercussions, because it artfully delves into the psychological cost through which came to define individual lives.

This review first appeared in The Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.

Darkness and the ‘new’ India in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

( I wrote this review for The Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.)

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, who addresses a series of letters to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. The novel is in the form of a dramatic monologue, in the tradition of Albert Camus’ The Fall and more recently, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Over seven nights, Balram narrates the story of his life. Born in a village in northern India, son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. Nursing a dream of escape, his big chance comes when he is hired as a chauffeur by a village landlord. The narrative follows Balram’s journey to Delhi, where after murdering his employer, he finally becomes a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore.

The dust jacket describes The White Tiger as the tale of two Indias. It is exactly where its problem lies, by reducing the multiple, complex layers of Indian life into a simplistic, binary opposition. Early in the novel, Balram says, “Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness.”

In its overtly Manichean perspective, its characters and situations are shorn of complexity, and reduced to archetypes. Balram’s narrative, at times, recedes into a patronising lament towards people of the social class he himself belongs to. Balram remarks, “The children ran along with me outside, little dirty brats born to one aunt or the other whose names I did not want to know, whose hair I did not want to touch.” So, in the Darkness, the poor are filthy and dirty – and yet it is impossible to imagine Balram sharing this view. What is happening is the constant overlap between the narrator Balram’s view of the world and Adiga’s own perceptions of that class. The resulting superficial tone, with its lack of nuance, serves to highlight the author’s distance from the subject and who cannot fully inhabit the world of his protagonist.

Further on, in the Darkness, the elections are always rigged. Balram remarks, “It’s the way it always is,” my father told me last night. “I’ve seen twelve elections – five general, five state, two local – and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves – isn’t that something?” This abrupt dismissal of electoral democracy naively interprets the machinations of electoral politics in northern India, where for the last two decades subaltern communities have actively sought empowerment through the ballot. The depiction of the politician known as The Great Socialist and the politicians bribed in Delhi are reduced to clichés, with their sexual amorality and lust for wealth.

The primary reason why The White Tiger is engaging is because of the energy of its prose and its swift, crackling wit. The conversation directed at the Chinese Premier works to great effect, though the connection may appear forced. The oppressive social structure of the village with its feudal hegemony is adeptly dealt with. The lack of basic amenities in the rural hinterland – the heart-rending death of Balram’s father by tuberculosis due to the absence of trained professionals is an indictment of the moral corruption that has come to dominate those who have a duty towards the under-privileged.

The tone is slick and fast-paced, and it charts new territory in its depiction of the aloofness of the rich towards the poor and the dangers this poses to social cohesion. Gurgaon, with its absurdly named high-rise apartment blocks, such as Buckingham Buildings and Windsor Estate and ever-growing number of malls is vividly described as a brutal, concrete jungle whose salient feature is the crude exhibitionism of wealth. The emergence of this new social ethos, whose roots lie in vulgar materialism, wreaks psychological conflict on the people who are excluded from the riches of the globalised economy.

By refusing to subscribe to a clichéd, exotic version of India, The White Tiger is the victim of another one – the new India. The rhetoric of the new India has acquired the status of a mythology in Western media reportage. The Booker Prize has always swayed in the direction of the prevailing, dominant perception of the Indian subcontinent. The disappointing part about The White Tiger is that instead of focusing on the uneasy co-existence within the contradictions of Indian urban life, it adds to that lazy classification – new India, as separate from the old.

The petit-bourgeois classes, stirred by visions of material utopia and alienated from their present condition by their contact with consumer culture, whose psyche was brilliantly examined in Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, form a glaring absence. The entrepreneur Balram, who now runs a taxi service in Bangalore from the stolen money of his employer, with his naiveté and delusions of grandeur, is one more example where a close examination has been abandoned in favour of an exaggerated, theatrical posture to press hard upon the reader the ‘new’ landscape of globalised India.

The White Tiger ventures into areas of darkness, but is lost in its abyss of easy generalisations and cliches. It aims to act as a mirror to the transformative changes that have taken place, but is unable to convincingly answer the questions it sets out for itself.

In conversation, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan studied English Literature at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi University and has been a journalist for many years. She writes the popular blog The Compulsive Confessor where she talks about her experiences as a young, single woman in urban India. Her first novel, You are Here, published by Penguin releases this month.

You have been writing your blog, The Compulsive Confessor, for many years. How important has blogging been in your evolution as a writer?

All writers, I feel, need to be writing constantly in order to be writers. The blog has helped me keep some sort of weekly discipline and hone my voice, so that by the end of two years I was writing exactly as I wanted to.

Tell us a little bit about your first novel.

It’s about a young girl negotiating the world. It’s based in Delhi, but I think it could also be any other big city in the world. Arshi, the protagonist, is trying very hard to get her life in a shape that she recognises. The book sort of goes back and forth between time so that you get a clear picture of who she is and who she wants to be.

There has hardly been any major work on this theme by an Indian writer. How difficult was the process of writing the novel, since there were no precedents to go by.

Not difficult at all. I’ve been writing some version of the same story since I was about seventeen. It began with Poornima who was sixteen in Seventeen And Still Standing and then there was Maya, I think, in In Limbo. (Whose best friend was called Arshi!) It’s basically a story of my generation and of people like me, and since I like to think that my work isn’t derivative, I guess it was okay that there weren’t any precedents.

You Are Here is a curious and intriguing title. How did you arrive at the title, since naming a book is the part writers find extremely difficult.

Oh, it was really, really tough coming up with a good name. I batted around a few hundred before I came to this one. It was the result of a brainstorming session with some friends, one of them said, ‘You are here’ and it clicked in my head. It’s supposed to be like a map sign, because Arshi really wishes she has one to help her see where she is and where she’s going.

People who read your blog often compare it to Sex and the City. How much has popular culture influenced your work?

As much as popular culture has influenced anyone else’s work I guess. I personally don’t believe there is much of a comparison to be made between my blog and any Western thing, whether it’s Bridget Jones or Sex And The City. But I guess for lack of anything else to compare it to, that was the closest label. Yes, it is about being young and single in a big city and the stuff that comes with that–dating, sex, men, friendships–but that’s where it begins to become my descriptions of being young and single and not Sarah Jessica Parker’s.

Tell us a little bit about your literary influences. What books did you read while growing up?

I read pretty much everything I could get my hands on. I loved the Anne of Green Gables books and Laura Ingalls Wilder books and as I grew older, I loved Salinger and  Gone With The Wind. Things like that. Basically, I’ve always loved your ’search for self’ stories, mostly stuff with a female heroine and things that spanned many years and generations.

You represent a new wave of young writers living in India, who are challenging stereotypes and exploring new themes. Do you think that the importance of Diaspora writers will diminish as time passes by?

Is growing up in a big city such a new theme? Perhaps in India, maybe, I mean, my book has no references to mango pickles or snake charmers, but I think it’s time we stopped thinking of ourselves with any labels at all. Women writers, diaspora writers, it’s all very lazy labelling to put people and books in brackets. I don’t see why any of us have to be representative of anything, except ourselves.

How much do you think globalization and its effects has changed the landscape of our cities? How have you dealt with this in your book?

As someone who has lived in two major Indian metros, sometimes when I think back to ten or fifteen years ago Levi’s jeans was something you got your ‘foreign’ relatives to bring back. The poshest localities now were then wilderness and the very first McDonald’s came up – it’s all very startling. I am old enough to remember pre-Internet, pre-cable TV days and sometimes I catch myself wondering what we did back then and if a child from now was teleported back in time how long would it take before they killed themselves out of boredom? It’s been interesting to watch also how globalisation has made us as a people change, I feel that now, a decade later, we are more confident and yet also struggling with a basic identity crisis–balancing the traditions on one hand with the modernity that new India is all about. Most of that is stuff I’ve delved into in my book.

Are there any plans for a book tour?

Yes, I will be launching the book in Delhi on the 22nd of August and then in Mumbai around the end of the month. There will be other cities, but I’m not sure which ones.

What next for you now? Are you working on another novel?

I’m figuring out the life of a writer.  Right now, I have a couple of columns here and there, and I’d like to travel once the book is out. I do have another book in mind but it’s in gestation stages, so I don’t know whether you could call that ‘working’ on something!

Shipwrecked Sailors

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in a fabulous interview, says -
In fact, I believe writers are always alone, like shipwrecked sailors in the middle of the ocean. It’s the loneliest profession in the world. No one can help you write what you are writing.

 

Later he’s asked about the magical element in his fiction, and he responds -

There’s not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.  

Narendra Modi in Hell

In times when mass murderers walk victorious with the hubris of bigots, perhaps only poetry can express our dismay and outrage.

I reproduce below Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem General Franco in Hell, written after the Spanish Civil War, but a voice that belches with deep resonance in our own benighted times -

Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping
with the voice of dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished door.

Indeed.
From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling
of your legions, in the holy milk
of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled
along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence, a broken
door.
Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung
of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure
of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,
oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,
of ill-born pallor of shadow?

The flame retreats without ash,
the salty thirst of hell, the circles
of grief turn pale. Cursed one, may only humans
pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may
you not be consumed, not be lost
in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass
or the
fierce foam.

Alone, alone, for the tears
all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands
and rotted eyes, alone in a cave
of your hell, eating silent pus and blood
through a cursed and lonely eternity. You do not deserve to sleep
even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:
you have to be
awake, General, eternally awake
among the putrefaction of the new mothers,
machine-gunned in the autumn.

All and all the sad children cut to
pieces,
rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell
that day of cold festivity: your arrival.
Children blackened by explosions,
red fragments of brain, corridors filled
with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the very posture
of crossing the street,
of kicking the ball,
of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.

Smiling. There are smiles
now demolished by blood
that wait with scattered exterminated teeth
and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces
of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless
ghosts, the dark
hidden ones, those who never left
their beds of rubble. They all wait for you
to spend the night. They fill the corridors
like decayed seaweed.

They are ours, they were our
flesh, our health, our
bustling peace, our ocean
of air and lungs. Through
them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,
turned into destroyed
substance, murdered matter, dead flour,
they await you in your hell.

Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,
neither terror nor sorrow awaits you. May you be alone and accursed,
alone and awake among all the dead,
and let blood fall upon you like rain,
and let a dying river of severed eyes
slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.

Loneliness

“Are you as lonely as that?” I asked.
Kafka nodded.
“Like Kaspar Hauser?”
Kafka laughed.
“Much worse than Kaspar Hauser. I’m as lonely as…..as Franz Kafka.”

- extract from Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka

Picasso on the Artist

The greatest artist of the past century, here’s Picasso dwelling on his tribe -

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place ; from the sky, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman, we don’t start measuring her limbs.

(Also he says something of immense resonance to the crisis in Salman Rushdie’s recent fiction -

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility. )

India 60 – On Culture and Reaching the Splendid City

As we approach the 60th year of Indian Independence, I feel a surge of patriotic feeling within me. I think the patriotism we feel is of a calmer nature. There is an absence of hyper-nationalist feeling in general. It is a patriotism at peace with itself, without a need to invoke comparisons to feel national pride.

Which makes me think – are we finally comfortable with the idea of India? The economic revival in the last decade or so has injected a new confidence. We’re no longer besieged by a paranoia about Western hegemony, India’s become a place that’s comfortable with the juxtaposition of both East and West. This is not a surprise considering the plural nature of our societies. Gandhi’s observation about an ideal intermingling of cultures is particularly resonant. He remarked,

I want all the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my home as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.

My feeling is, we’re closer to achieving this ideal than ever before.

Yet, any blanket statement on India is always a folly. As numerous statistics will tell you, we still have sub-Saharan living standards in vast swathes of this country. As numerous statistics do prove, basic amenities have not reached everyone. Problems of hunger and farmer suicides still persist. Clearly, we have a long way to go.

I was reading Pablo Neruda’s Nobel acceptance speech this morning in which he quotes the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud (who also inspired Jim Morrison).

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.

Neruda reiterates this as a goal of humanity, that only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.

I think it wonderfully illustrates and reminds us of where we stand as a nation. The Splendid City is still far away. Are we prepared for the struggle that lies ahead of us? Will we ever enter the City, or will it descend into oblivion as an unattainable ideal?

The choice lies with us.